{"id":2941,"date":"2017-07-17T08:00:20","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/?p=2941"},"modified":"2017-07-16T20:22:44","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T00:22:44","slug":"presentation-and-poster-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/2017\/07\/17\/presentation-and-poster-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"Resources for People Who Wanna Present Stuff Good and Do Other Stuff Good Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Presentations are hard. You\u2019ve been thinking about something for a long time, and you can get tunnel vision. What do you mean, everyone looking at your poster or going to your talk doesn\u2019t already know why you care about the components of the representation space of \u03c0<\/span>1<\/sub><\/span>(M) into PSL(2,R) with extremal Euler characteristic??? Luckily, if you want to up your presentation game, you\u2019re not entirely on your own.<\/span><\/p>\n

One good way to improve your posters and presentations, of course, is to go to lots of poster sessions and talks and keep an eye on what\u2019s working and isn\u2019t for the presenter and their audience. But you can also get advice from around the math and science blogsophere.<\/span><\/p>\n

For presentations, Dan Meyer has a good post about how to prepare for a talk<\/span><\/a>. It boils down to \u201ctestify and practice,\u201d but he gives a lot of specific advice on the nitty gritty details of how exactly he does that. He\u2019s writing specifically for math teachers, but his presentation tips will be applicable to math research talks and other professional topics. The comments also have some feedback, and he wrote a follow-up post of some advice from 14 of his favorite math education speakers<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zen Faulkes, an invertebrate neuroethologist (I had to look it up too<\/span><\/a>) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has a free e-book<\/span><\/a> (pdf) of presentation tips from his blog, NeuroDojo<\/span><\/a>. He also has a blog devoted to helping people make better posters<\/span><\/a>. I especially appreciate the constructive critiques<\/span><\/a> of real posters, like this one about two posters by mathematical biology graduate student Chris Miles<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I asked for suggestions for this post on Twitter<\/span><\/a>, astronomers stepped up. Thanks, astronomers!\u00a0Meredith Rawls, an astronomy postdoc at the University of Washington, wrote a blog post<\/span><\/a> about how she made an award-winning poster for a conference. She and other astronomers also pointed to tips from Kimberly Cartier<\/span><\/a> and Jason Wright<\/span><\/a> and this list from a blog called Astrobetter<\/span><\/a> whose goal<\/span><\/a> is \u201cto provide information and tips about streamlining all the things we need to do Astronomy well.\u201d People also suggested Edward Tufte<\/span><\/a>, particularly for presentations that have a lot of data visualization.<\/span><\/p>\n

I got great suggestions from friends on Facebook as well:<\/span><\/p>\n